


Half and Half and Whole

by Barkour



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Bluepulse Bash, Established Relationship, Future Fic, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-21
Updated: 2013-03-21
Packaged: 2017-12-05 23:22:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/729073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the baby wakes up early, Bart's on call; but parenting's about teamwork.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half and Half and Whole

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Bluepulse Bash, Day 4: "Snack." This is basically self-indulgent fluff (with a BABY!) so, uh, keep that in mind? All right.

Graciela woke some few minutes before five in the morning like she did most days. The baby monitor picked up her comfortable babbling, and Bart fumbled for the dial that controlled the volume. His finger caught the edge wrong; the monitor roared, and Bart hastily snapped the volume off entirely.

Jaime stirred at his back. “Whas—” His hand felt at Bart’s hip, groping in the darkness for some anchor. His thumb dug into the little, giving muscle over the bone.

“Just the baby,” Bart said. He squinted first one eye then the other, trying to get the sleep out of the both of them. “Go back to sleep. I’m on baby duty.”

So Jaime made a soft and sleepy sound, and his hand drifted away from Bart. He’d taken most of the sheets, too. In the wake of Jaime’s touch, Bart prickled with cold. Graciela wouldn’t mind if he wasted another half hour in bed, but Jaime, who had a twelve-hour shift at the hospital in three hours, would.

Turned over on his side with his shoulder sticking up, Jaime was warm and steady; steady like coming home at midnight to a dark apartment and not needing to turn on a lamp to find his way. The scarab nestled in his flesh showed as a lightless blot. As Jaime breathed, his shoulder rose; his back swelled slightly and then eased again.

Graciela murmured in her crib in her room, and Bart bent to kiss his husband. He started with the corner of Jaime’s jaw, the strong angle his beard hadn’t covered and wouldn’t cover, no matter how Jaime frowned at the mirror; then Bart kissed the tender underside of Jaime’s jaw, where his throat started. The peculiar smells of formula, like milk gone off, and baby powder (clean, sweet) had stuck to Jaime, and when Bart pressed his lips to Jaime’s shoulder, that mingled smell washed over him; and under it, Jaime was Jaime.

Then Jaime pushed back. His shoulder, square, nicely muscled, caught Bart in the chest, right in the center, next to his heart.

“Not now,” Jaime grumbled. “Gotta work.”

“What? I didn’t say anything,” Bart said. “I didn’t get the chance to say good night last night. Making up for lost time.”

“Bart, ‘s too _early_ ,” Jaime groaned, and he rolled over onto his front. His arm flopped down off the side of the bed. His shoulders tensed a moment – the blades flexed, like wings – and then he began, again, to relax.

“I can take a hint,” Bart stage-whispered from behind his hand, and then, just to show he had no hard feelings, he brushed the hair back from Jaime’s nape and left a little, soft kiss there in the middle where it would be safe.

Jaime just grumbled again. No appreciation for the things Bart did, although, to be fair, right now sleep would be the kinder gift. Even Bart had to acknowledge that. So, lightly, Bart got up and slipped out of their shared bedroom in his t-shirt and boxers.

Their daughter’s bedroom door was open, as it was every night, same as their bedroom door. If the monitor failed, her voice would carry down the hall. She was sitting up in her crib, chewing on a corner of her favorite blanket, and she’d her face turned up to the ceiling, watching the slowly roving constellations cast by the revolving night light. Then Bart came in and Graciela lit up.

“Hey, chatty,” Bart said, “you forget how to sleep again? You know you’re supposed to stay down, right?”

She stuck her arms up and said, “Dada, Dada, Dada,” and scooted forward, her chubby legs kicking.

“Trying to sweet talk me,” he said. “Well, lucky for you I’m a sucker for sweet talkers.”

He hauled her up out of her crib and got her settled on his hip. Graciela thanked him for this by burbling in his ear and then pressing her damp face against his neck and sneezing. Babies, he reflected again, were a lot wetter than he’d expected. Barry and Iris had warned him. So had Jaime, who’d changed a few of Milagro’s diapers in his day. Bart had promptly forgotten all their warnings.

Diaper change was the first order of business. No solid deposits, but liquid assets were evident. Bart got her out of the old diaper and into a new one in half a millisecond, and he got a sweet free throw into the bin. Nothing but net.

“Don’t you complain about changing diapers,” Jaime had said to him that first week. “You change her diaper, she doesn’t even know. I change her diaper, she’s trying to roll off the table.”

“Papa’s just trying to punish me for being the awesome dad,” Bart told Graciela, but Graciela was preoccupied with fitting as much of her hand in her mouth as she could; the politics of marriage were beyond her.

“You hungry? You want to get something to eat?”

He pulled her fingers gently from her mouth. At just under a year, she only had her front teeth, but she’d already nipped herself a couple times over the last week; she hadn’t drawn blood, Jaime reported, but she’d definitely drawn tears.

Bart carted her to the kitchen where he got the formula set and a mug of water going in the microwave. The minute waiting for the water to heat up was agonizing, with Graciela squirming – she’d seen the formula going into the bottle – and nothing for Bart to do but hold on to her and tap his feet.

Graciela grunted and tried to lean out of his arms. She strained for the counter and the bottle sitting there, so Bart pivoted on his heel, dragging her away from both.

“I know,” he said, trying to reason as Graciela, grappling with his shoulder, tried force. “I hate waiting, too. It majorly sucks. But you remember what happened the last time we tried a shortcut, right? Daddy made a really big mess.”

He’d figured, heat was just friction, so if he just shook the bottle fast enough, boom, no wait time; but he hadn’t thought it through. Jaime, hearing Graciela’s shrieks, had turned the corner to find Bart standing, shocked, in the middle of an explosively large pool of formula (still cold). The cap had rocketed off and wedged into the wall, and Jaime had turned, spotted it, looked back at Bart looking down at his wet feet, and laughed so hard he had to go sit down in the next room.

So Bart played it safe this time, sticking this bottle of cold formula into the mug of hot water and waiting for the bottle to warm to room temperature or as close as he could manage with Graciela getting louder. He paced the kitchen and the little living room, again and again, bouncing her on his hip as he cycled.

“Hey, Gracie, Papa’s sleeping. You want to play the quiet game?” He’d hated the quiet game. Graciela hated it, too, and told him so.

“Yeah,” he said, “the quiet game’s for pill-suckers. You want to play another game? A different game? Let’s play, uh, how fast can Daddy run across Texas?”

Daddy could run across Texas in a half second, taking it easy, and he did it twenty times each way just to double-check the timing. The formula was still pretty chilly; so, hoisting Graciela high on his hip, he ran the outline of the state twenty times, too. Graciela laughed high and wild in his ear. Her hands were fisted tightly in his t-shirt, pulling the collar out of shape to the side, and she kicked at his ribs so he’d go even faster.

So far as looks went, Graciela was all Reyes, but there was a little Allen in her, too. When they got back to the apartment, Bart phasing through the front door with Gracie hitched against his shoulder, the formula was ready, and Jaime was up and in the kitchen.

“I thought you were sleeping,” Bart said.

He got the bottle out of the mug, wiped off the hot water on his shirt, and gave it over to Graciela. She grunted happily and then settled back in Bart’s arms. Gracie liked to cuddle in the morning and before naps, and trying to put her down now would just set off one of her rare fits.

Jaime elbowed the refrigerator door shut. He had the gallon of orange juice in one hand and the carton of eggs in the other, and he was just in briefs and socks.

“I was,” he said, “but then some guy sin vergüenza tried to get fresh with me.”

“That wasn’t fresh,” Bart protested. “I was just trying to say hello. From me to you. I didn’t know your face was off-limits. When was that decided? Huh?”

“Hello, niñita,” said Jaime, and he leaned forward to kiss Graciela on her soft cheek. Gracie, busy with her bottle, accepted this as her due.

“This is the thanks I get,” said Bart. “Well, while you were sleeping, I was taking care of the little squirt.”

Jaime set the orange juice and the eggs down on the counter.

“Well, Papa’s got her now,” Jaime said. “Your arms got to be tired from carrying her around all morning.”

He reached for their daughter, and Bart gave her up. The juggling exercise was one they’d fretted over when Graciela had been just a tiny newborn, one day old and just home from STAR Labs.

“What if I drop her?” Bart had blurted when Jaime had offered Gracie for him to hold.

“You’re not going to drop her,” Jaime had said.

But Bart had looked at Graciela, small and wrinkled and perfectly fitted to Jaime’s steady arms, and he’d held his hands out not to take her but to stave Jaime off.

“I still trip over my feet sometimes. I can’t hold her—I’ll just break her or something.”

“It’s easy,” Jaime had said, and he’d actually taken one of his arms out from Graciela to grab Bart by the wrist and pull him near. “Just hold her, like this. You got to give her head some support, too. Her neck’s not so strong.”

Now, passing her along was easy like Jaime had said, just another simple thing done throughout the day. Jaime’s hand brushed Bart’s arm, and the stroke of the thumb over Bart’s wrist was like a kiss.

“Don’t you start thinking this makes up for you disparaging my character in front of our impressionable child,” Bart warned Jaime.

Jaime’s eyes were lowered; he was smiling down at Graciela as he got her situated more comfortably in his arms. Their dark skin matched, their black and curling hair too, and as Jaime tickled the bottom of Graciela’s little foot with a finger, Gracie smiled over her bottle at Jaime and at Bart standing there at Jaime’s shoulder.

Perhaps it was only how little sleep he’d gotten between racing against the clock to stop Kobra and getting Graciela ready for the day. Maybe that was why for one little moment Bart just wanted to press his face into the back of Jaime’s neck. So he did, tucking his head to rest his forehead on Jaime’s nape.

“Go back to bed, Bart,” Jaime said. “I think I can handle Gracie for a couple hours. Who d’you think changes her diapers when you’re racing Superman?”

“The scarab,” Bart said to Jaime’s back.

Jaime laughed, and then he stiffened and said, “Hey! I’m not repeating that.”

Bart wound his arms around Jaime’s back, getting his hands together under Jaime’s cupped arms so that when Graciela bobbed her feet, she got Bart with her heels, too. The breadth of Jaime’s back, the fragrance of his skin, the familiar way his shoulders tipped when he turned in question: all this, and Gracie, too. Bart thought, not for the first time, how very lucky he was to be alive and living like this.

“What?” asked Jaime. His breath caught Bart’s temple. Jaime shifted Graciela in his arms, and she complained as the movement jostled the bottle out of her mouth. The curling ends of Jaime’s hair swept Bart’s cheek as Bart made to straighten.

“You okay back there, marido? Or do you need me to carry you back to bed?”

“Nah,” Bart said, “I think I can manage.” But before he so much as pushed off, he gave in to temptation and dropped another small kiss between Jaime’s shoulder blades, on the scarred stretch of skin just above the scarab, where the touch was needed most.

“I’m totally crash,” he said.


End file.
